Hi there! I just saw your post requesting STDs for another save the date week and wanted to send in the one my fiance and I designed for ours. I came up with the design, and my fiance Anthony hand drew everything including the text, then used Illustrator to tweak and color.

Here are some save-the-dates I designed for a darling NYC bride! I just loved her idea of incorporating antique keys. We are printing these digitally, but we’ll be gocco-ing her invites & RSVP cards. I’m in Raleigh, NC, where we’ve just had a 90-degree day- Jen’s colors are a refreshingly cool retreat for me!

What we love about our save the date postcard is that it’s not necessarily obvious to everyone what it is, but everyone we sent it to loved it regardless. Matt and I met in Baltimore (I’m from NY, he’s from FL, and we met in grad school) so we wanted to somehow incorporate into our wedding the city where we met and spent two years together and with which we fell in love (and in which we fell in love!). The characters on the front are stylized versions of two Baltimore food and drink icons, Mr. Boh (the face of National Bohemian beer) and the Utz Girl (the face of Utz chips). The two were prominently featured in a billboard in Baltimore in which he was proposing to her, and it was so well-loved by everyone in Baltimore that it stayed up for nearly two years. Matt and I decided we wanted to use that billboard as our save the date, and my dear friend Amy, who is a graphic designer, reinterpreted the billboard into what you see here; we got them printed through VistaPrint for next to nothing. On the back, we included the two characters in their original forms from the billboard and also a link to our website, on which we explained to our friends and family who are not familiar with Baltimore – which is most of them – who those characters are and why we used them on our save the dates. I love when save the dates are fun and unrelated to the actual wedding invitation, so I had to go that route with ours!

I did these on Illustrator and printed and cut them myself. I also used gray A9 envelopes from papersource (where I got that neat embosser) which I lined with a photo of us from our engagement session with Punam Bean ( see here http://www.punambean.com/blog/?p=279). I was going to do custom stamps
but did not like the price so I was excited that the ‘love’ series stamp from the USPS worked well on the gray envelope. My last addition were the moo stickers which sealed the envelope in lieu of licking the glue – we did not want people to use a letter opener so you could see our lovely lining.